Re-learning trauma

As we may have seen earlier, memory being constantly re-generated, re-created and re-directed through sensorimotricity, the uses of symbolic memory select those patterns and structures which it maintains. Those are useful, notably, to social interactions and protection. Moreover, trauma helps or forces us to occupy spaces of interaction that would be likely to keep us safe, or safer than other ways. But one thing that we can learn from the scales in which short-, middle- and long-term memory generate and sustain useful patterns to sensorimotricity and imagination, is that we never learn anything once. What we learn is constantly re-learnt, because memory is never fixed, it is either sustained directly or it is indirectly.

The indirect way is the one of trauma, that builds up around the memory of pain – either slight or large – others ways of interacting with what surrounds us. As we are invited to learn and sustain what is presented to us as viable ways to do so, first by our parent-s or caretaker-s, we all have our own ways of measuring the distance between anticipated and unanticipated trauma. That is, between one that is explained in a way or another by the teaching of social patterns and meaning, and the other that is not and then fully in the charge of the individual themselves – often kept secret.

What we mean to address here is that hopefully, either the one or the other has to constantly be re-learnt and redefined. We constantly have the choice to do so, unless the trauma built around the memory of the wound is too deeply rooted to the ways that we had to find to keep ourselves safe. The way that trauma is anticipated, for example when we teach children to mind danger, can create and elude another kind of trauma that isn’t cleared out to be heard. That is the case in rape culture, when we notably teach little and young girls to mind their behaviour and appearance so not to attract sexual aggressors – the responsability becomes theirs to make aggression not happen. That is also the case with racialised people teaching their kids to mind their conduct so it would not raise racist interpretation, tainting their behaviour with prejudice due to the colour of their skin, more likely to be dehumanised and disposable – the responsability becomes theirs to bear the charge of anticipating racism. The same goes on with other kinds of discrimination based on class, race, gender, sexuality or ability.

But the world of memory is more mobile than we think and the relation to aggression, its memory and the persistance of potential re-enactment can also be redefined. Trauma builds up around the wound, that leaves the mark of the object that is the source of the aggression, which we would try to avoid further on. What is important to understand, to all people who experienced trauma, is that the source of the aggression, the aggressor-s cast aggression on you. The aggression and its contact is the object that makes the memory. Even the face of one aggressor becomes an abstract image and situations of domination are ones where the person-s that cast it use it as a mean of torture – as they can use it again and wield the power on you to do so. But, the object of aggression doesn’t belong to them, it belongs to you, for you create a memory. You can, hopefully, untie it from the person-s that believe they can cast it and submit your identity to this tie. Yet, ultimately, that is you that have the power to situate this memory in your body and not theirs.

The most difficult thing is to abstract the object of the wound from the threat of its re-enactment. As you re-learn everything that you do and know at every moment, for you are one body based on sensorimotricity, you can re-learn and re-direct this object as something that is fully yours to remember, to situate in your life, your past, your present, and define. No one else can define it for you feel it, and the other should be powerless to own that, unless you let them.

That is my call to you : once the thorn is out of your skin, it is no longer what sustains the pain that it might have provoked. This pain belongs to you and you only. And you might want to choose where it will take you.